Technicals have obviously deteriorated and, through midday Thursday, decliners are leading advancers nearly two-to-one on the Big Board and more than two-to-one on the NASDAQ. Sentiment has turned sour and I even heard one trader refer to America’s tech darling as CR-AAPL, which is down another 3 percent and near session lows. The number of stocks setting new 52-week highs has dwindled to 32, from 142 two days ago. New 52-week lows number 131, from 47 prior to the election. Yet, some of the commodities are seeing strength. Crude oil is up 70 cents to $85.14 and gold added $15.5 to $1729.5. The only economic stat of the day was jobless claims, which dropped to a better-than-expected 355K (vs. 370K consensus) last week. The report failed to lift the market from the bearish funk. The Dow is down another 70 points and the NASDAQ dropped 30.

Overall option volumes are lighter than Wednesday, but continue to reflect the cautious underlying tone. With a little over an hour to trade, projected volume is 17 million contracts. 6.8 million calls and 7.1 million puts so far. iShares Emerging Markets Fund (EEM) Nov 40.5 puts are the day’s most actives. 131,000 traded. EEM dropped 50 cents to $40.95 amid volatility across global equity markets Thursday. The biggest trade today, which is also the largest block of options traded in almost two weeks, was a 96000-lot of Jan 15 puts on SPDR Financials (XLF). Shares are down 4 cents to $15.57 after the 3.3 percent swoon suffered yesterday. JC Penney (JCP) sees active trading ahead of its profit report and Qualcomm (QCOM) saw a flurry of action post-earnings. Meanwhile, CBOE Volatility Index (.VIX) is down 4.35 percent to 18.24 after spiking to multi-month highs of 19.08 yesterday.

Frederic Ruffy is a well-known trader, writer, and strategist who has spent years educating investors and creating intelligent, insightful, unbiased market observations that are frequently cited by the Wall Street Journal and other financial publications. As senior analyst, Fred provides frequent and regular notes and daily updates for activity of interest.